


paracosm.

by izzyharel



Series: a compendium of what j.k rowling never said. [1]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Book 3: Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Canon Compliant, Hogwarts Third Year, Marauders, Marauders Era (Harry Potter), Marauders Friendship (Harry Potter), Other, Professor Remus Lupin
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-14
Updated: 2020-12-14
Packaged: 2021-03-11 05:08:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,241
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28059702
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/izzyharel/pseuds/izzyharel
Summary: Remus Lupin didn’t know what would happen when he was summoned into Severus Snape’s office to see him and Harry Potter squabbling. What he didn’t expect was an old map and a host of memories to accompany it.・A paracosm is a detailed imaginary world. Paracosms are thought generally to originate in childhood and to have one or numerous creators.
Relationships: Remus Lupin & Harry Potter, Remus Lupin & James Potter, Remus Lupin & Lily Evans Potter, Remus Lupin & Peter Pettigrew, Sirius Black & Remus Lupin, Sirius Black & Remus Lupin & Peter Pettigrew & James Potter
Series: a compendium of what j.k rowling never said. [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2141601
Comments: 2
Kudos: 15





	paracosm.

Remus J. Lupin wasn’t entirely sure how he had found himself in the Hogwarts kitchens. His feet had wandered of their own violation, carrying his body down pathways and corridors known by heart. Even as his brain stopped functioning and remembering, his body recalled. Down past secret passages he had meticulously marked in his youth, he ambled until he stood in the basements of the large castle. With a shaky finger, Lupin tickled the pear in the painting that marked the secretive entrance to the kitchens and wandered in. There were flickers of recognition in the eyes of the house-elves, who had seen a little boy with the same scars walk into the room a thousand times over to request a bewildering array of food, arms linked with three other boys with the same insatiable appetites. 

It was hunger that had bound all the marauders together at first. James’s hunger for friends, Sirius’s hunger to be something other than the scion of a noble family, Remus’s hunger for something outside self-loathing to hold onto, and Peter’s hunger to be around others, to be around the most popular boys in school. This hunger was added to by their ravenous appetites and hunger for actual food. They had found the kitchens early in their tenure at Hogwarts when they were young enough to sit on the floor and press themselves into the corners of the room as not to disturb the house-elves. It ensured their furtive plans were not overheard, not even by the house-elves who supplied them with snacks. When they found the passage to Hogsmeade in their third year, the boys had come less frequently to the kitchens for food. There was an endless supply of candy to be found in Honeydukes, easily paid for by the affluence of pureblood boys with pockets full of galleons. 

Even so, Lupin found the small corner the four had once shoved themselves into with a graceless gait. He then stared at the small corner with a distant expression, thinking back to being eleven years old and stuck in a pile of limbs and legs of gangly boys trying to smash together into a small space. The world had seemed so large then. Every crevice and secret was theirs and theirs alone. They were infinite, a group of four that could take on the entire world. Even a small corner had seemed large, even as their bodies squished together. With James’s laughter and Sirius’s witty comments, anything was possible and larger than life. Even little corners. Without any of his friends, Lupin sat down. It was decidedly more easy to squish into a corner with just himself. Time had not been kind to Remus. Gaunt and pale, his clothes were more threadbare than ever. Silver scars crisscrossed his skin, a miserable lucidity to the way he carried himself with slumped shoulders and a solemn smile that never truly dispelled the indignities of his short life. He had always been tall and lanky, uneven on his feet. It had been a struggle to ever put on weight, and without any determination or war to keep him fit, Remus was skin and bones once more. It was this unassuming nature that made it so he could vanish once monthly without any suspicion. Professor Lupin, who taught students how to fight boggarts, surely could not be a werewolf! He was too fun for that. And far too beggarly in appearance. 

With his lithe build, he could still fit in the same space he had shoved himself in as a child. Lanky legs pulled toward his chest, lurid and wan body easily fitting into the same space that he had once sat in at eleven with his friends, Lupin sat. The tremors wracking his body had only just started to ebb and cease, but they quickly started again when he gently inspected the map in his hand.

A choked out laugh ripped its way out of the werewolf’s throat. Unlike the howls that made his throat raw and sore after the full moon, this was an acrimonious and angry pain that soon made it impossible to breathe steadily. Usually when Remus was too stressed to breathe, Lily could calm him down with a soothing word or two or James could fix it with a claim that “saying you have a dry-heaving problem is nowhere near as cool as having a furry little problem, Moony.” Without any of his friends left, there was nothing but Remus and gasping breaths to fill the silence of the kitchens. He had cried as a child only after the full moons when it was impossible not to do so. When the world ached and hurt so much that the only freedom had been a chocolate bar in the infirmary. 

He had forgotten how to cry by the age of fifteen when his pain was instead filled by nights spent running outside with a stag, rat, and dog. And while Remus couldn’t remember what exactly happened while he was a werewolf, he remembered joy. He remembered waking up and not being afraid because there were people who cared about him waiting above in the castle to plan their next midnight romp and their next big prank. That joy had followed him into adulthood. Even as they fought in a war that no teenager should have to battle in, all four of them would pile onto James and Lily’s tattered couch and forget that they were all in danger. They would jokingly try to figure out a nickname for Lily that fit. 

“No James, Lady-Prongs is not a good name, mate.” Sirius had affectionately yelled out, stripping off his blood-stained boots as he entered the tiny cottage in Godric’s Hallows. He was beaten down and bruised from a day of fighting, but they all were. All it took was one look at the rest of their makeshift family to make the stress vanish away. As they grew older and the war raged on, they grew together. When Lily grew pregnant, debates over which marauder the baby would be named after stretched long into the night. 

And then the night had swallowed everything. 

One day he was Moony, a member of a pack. The next, he was just a waif in Dumbledore’s army of child soldiers. James and Sirius did everything quickly. They had no time to waste. They reviled in ephemeralness, in being fleeting presences of twin smiles in everyone’s life. They left Lupin’s life like that, in a brusque manner. One minute they were planning a celebration for Harry’s birthday and the next, James and Lily were dead and Sirius was evil. 

Sirius Black, who had turned his back on his entire family to support James and his friends. Sirius, who was Harry’s godfather. Sirius, a turn-coat. 

James, who played with a snitch and brushed back his hair even as an adult, who tried to write love-songs for Lily without even knowing how to play the guitar, dead. 

Lily, the brightest witch of her age who had simply laughed when she found out Remus’s secret and remarked that she had thought it would be a lot worse. She had bought him a dog hairbrush as a Christmas gift once. Lily, who was the kindest and best of all of them, dead.

Peter, the coward who shouldn’t have been involved in their war, who had always been tugged into their schemes with a long-suffering sigh, dead. At Sirius’s hands. They were all dead because of Sirius. 

Every moment of his childhood fell flat. When James smiled at Sirius, how could he know that Sirius would one day kill him? Was every smile fallacious? No. Sirius wouldn’t be evil. Someone had to have something wrong. There was an imperious curse, there was something that went wrong. It should have been Remus. Remus should have died, not them. He should have been the traitor, the liar. He was always a mistake in their friend group, no matter how beloved. A wolf did not become a house-pet, just because you loved it and treated it like one. Wild creatures had claws and teeth. They would bite when backed into a corner. 

He was a werewolf. He had assumed he would be pushed aside when the secret got out. But, he had been given a family and people to care about. Somehow, they all had been taken away. Those he loved had killed one another and left him behind, left behind a grown man hyperventilating with only house-elves as company. “I.. solemnly..” 

Remus bit out another choked out laugh. When had he ever been up to any good? He hadn’t done good when he managed to turn a blind-eye to Sirius being the turncoat. He certainly hadn’t done anything good by running away when he found out Harry was an orphan. He had teetered with the idea of offering to raise Harry, but where would they live? For all that Remus cared for the boy, there was nothing he could offer him. And besides, who would want to live with a werewolf? There was no good when it came to Remus Lupin.

His breathing stopped being erratic, his breath caught in his throat as apprehension coursed throughout his entire body. “Swear I am up to no good.” As the map opened, Lupin craned forward. He studied the map with wide eyes and prayed that the ancient paper would reveal something about his friends. Would remind him that they had moved on safely. Lupin stared at the map, watching names go by. They all blurred together. None of them were the names he sought out, were the boys who liked to wander to random passages when the others were looking at the map.

“Map hide and seek. It’ll be harder to catch us without the map so you can use it, Wormtail. Whoever you find first has to give you some of their candy,” Sirius had suggested the idea for the game that way before dragging James and Remus out into the halls. Was his cruelty toward Peter a reason he easily murdered Peter years later? How could the wand that had jinxed so many pureblood extremists kill Peter? None of it made sense. As years passed and Remus confined himself to a solidarity existence without his friends, he was left with nothing but loose ends and nothing salient to explain what had happened that fateful Halloween night. 

The only thing concrete was Harry. With his father’s hair and prowess at quidditch, with Lily’s quick wit and acidic comebacks. Sometimes Remus wondered if Harry would like to hear stories of his family and of the marauders. Seeing Harry with the map had changed that. Snape’s ire did not deserve to be directed toward Harry. The boy who had conquered Voldemort did not deserve more toil put on his shoulders. He did not deserve to know of the man Sirius had been. Remus could rest easy in knowing that he was taking care of James’s son, however indirectly. Through helping the boy, he was repaying a debt. Through teaching students, he was repaying that same debt. 

There was a thrill to teaching young witches and wizards. He liked helping them. It felt better than being helpless when it came to his friends. Lupin liked having something to wake up for that wasn’t worrying about Greyback or Voldemort returning. He liked having three meals a day and liked speaking with familiar faces again. Even if Snivellus was a professor too. 

That drew a laugh out of him. Thinking back to the words on the map that Snape had furiously read earlier, Lupin snorted. “Mr Prongs would like to add that Professor Snape is an ugly git,” Remus told the air. Even as he spoke out loud, he didn’t hear himself. He heard the voice of a tall boy with broad shoulders and an earnest smile. He heard the voices of four excited boys trying to figure out how to pour their personalities into a map and their triumph upon figuring it out. 

Remus stared at the map for a second longer. “Mischief managed.” He finally muttered, looking away from the map. There were no answers to be found in the paper. There was nothing that could explain what Sirius had done or the fact that his friends were dead. The map wouldn’t bring them back, nor would anything Remus did. Pocketing the map, Remus made no attempt to rise upward. He merely sat in the kitchens of his youth, homemade map in his pocket, distantly watching memories of a time long-since passed waltz across his eyelids. All the while, the map sat untouched.

He wouldn’t open it again for a while. Not until a certain trio of Gryffindors snuck down to watch the execution of a hippogriff and a fourth figure followed with them, name brazenly displayed on the map despite the fact he was thought dead. When Harry Potter confronted Sirius Black and Peter Pettigrew watched, Remus Lupin came down with a map in tow. And for a few short minutes, Messrs. Moony, Padfoot, and Wormtail were back in the place where it all started, where they once ran free under the full moon. When Harry Potter summoned the patronus of a stag later that night, for the first time since the 70s, a stag, werewolf, rat, and a black dog ran free on the grounds of Hogwarts just one last time.


End file.
